Spring/Summer 1998, Volume 15.2

Conversation

James Barbour

Shooting the Breeze with Ron Carlson: Cues from a Pro

James Barbour (MFA, Arizona State U) is a sports writer and
free-lance journalist, whose work has appeared in Weber Studies, Atlanta
Review, Cimarron Review, and The River Review/La Revue Riviere (forthcoming).
See other work by James Barbour published in Weber
Studies: Vol. 13.2, Vol.
17.1, and Vol.
22.2.

Listening to the stories of the popular
author and teacher as he discusses his new book and his trouble with Evil while playing
pool

The Cue Club is a welcome retreat from the 90
degree temperatures outside. It's dark and quiet, the kind of place writers might have
come to talk about their work in another era. Except for the NBA game flickering from
television monitors above the bar, the dark-paneled, brassy Cue Club could easily be the
scene of a story by Ring Lardner or James T. Farrell. With a sigh of relief, Ron Carlson
walks through the front door. After a preliminary pint of Guinness Stout, Carlson
proposes a game of billiards, as he discusses his evolution as a writer.

Carlson himself is a genial presence, and no
mean hand with a pool cue. A tall, handsome man, with silver hair that still gives him a
youthful air, he maintains a friendly blur of conversation, commenting wryly about his own
shots, and complimenting his opponent's. He wins the first break, and lines up three quick
shots that drop solid-colored balls into the pool table's pockets.

"It goes like this," Ron begins.
"I was a very happy kid, animal happy, unconscious, blessed: baseball, bicycles, the
sleep-out record. You can look it all up: the west side of Salt Lake City was the garden
of Eden. And I've grown up to be a happy man. Who can talk like this? They'll edit this
for sure. But I'll be fifty this fall. The evidence may be in."

Ron Carlson was born in Logan, Utah. His
parents moved to a working-class suburb of Salt Lake City~ and he grew up there with two
younger brothers in a kind of Little Rascals / Norman Rockwell version of the fifties. His
father, a welding engineer, taught him to fish and camp in the mountains of Utah. His
mother, a poet and self-taught linguist, was a famous local contestor. In 1959, for
twenty-five words or less, she won $15,000 dollars.

"My father was stories; my mother was
words. She's still a member of the National Puzzlers League. She's got twenty kinds of
dictionaries."

Carlson earned his baccalaureate degree from
the University of Utah in 1970, where he met Elaine Craig (his wife of 27 years) in a
literature class. They were married shortly after graduation. While he was pursuing his
master's degree, Carlson began to work with David Kranes.

"There was a real sense of ignition. Kranes was an
inspired teacher, and I've modeled a lot of my own teaching after him. Frankly, he helped
me find out what I was writing, that it was possible to go ahead with it. I realized, when
Kranes took my stories as seriously as I did, that this wasn't just an assignment crossing
his desk."

Fresh from graduate school, Ron and Elaine
taught at Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, and Ron worked on his first novel. Betrayed
by F. Scott Fitzgerald was published by W.W. Norton in 1977. His second novel Truants
(1981) soon followed, as well as his highly successful short story collections News
of the World (1987) and Plan B for the Middle Class (1992), all published by
Norton.

Carlson has been a writing teacher for over
twenty-five years, and a professor at Arizona State University since 1986. He's just
finished a six year stint as the Director of the University's Creative Writing program.
His short fiction appears in national publications such as GQ, Harpers, and Esquire.
Carlson co-hosts a program devoted to books and writers called "Books &
Company," which is broadcast on the PBS affiliate KAET. He is a frequent guest
instructor at writers' conferences such as "Writers at Work" and the Aspen
Writers Conference.

His latest collection of short stories is a
departure from the tone of Carlson's previous efforts -the new writing has a tougher, more
visceral edge. The Hotel Eden takes a litmus test of the emotional tenor of
America's suburbs and small towns.

"The main difference is that I'm a lot
less deft than I used to be," Carlson says, with an embarrassed laugh. "But
that's an interesting question because it speaks to the genesis and migration of story
ideas. Very often the sound of the characters speaking has helped me. Sometimes what they
say opens up a whole inventory, so I turn over as many rocks as I can, and often, those
elements instruct me as I write."

Carlson explains that creating short stories
for him frequently involves examining a situation from a skewed perspective, hoping this
will give him insight into the hearts of his characters. "It's like looking behind
the cardboard man, and seeing what's holding it up," he observes.

Nancy Forbes, writing in the New York Book
Review (4 January1987), said of Carlson's earlier works that "the subject matter
is domestic life, whose secrets he tracks like a hunter, flushing them out with paranoid
intensity." Indeed, anything which threatens to disrupt the family Carlson sees as an
element of the chaos of modern life.

"So much of our fiction involves people
out of context," Carlson remarks. It is that sense of dislocation which figures most
prominently in The Hotel Eden.

Carlson prowls around the pool table,
examining different possibilities before settling on a long across-the-table shot in the
comer pocket. As the six ball drops, he denies that he's consciously worked away from his
previous fiction, which some critics found sentimental. Richard Eder wrote in The Los
Angeles Times that the stories in News of The World tended to be "an
outpouring instead of an evaporation of spirit."

"It was at a time when the dew was on
everything," Carlson says, reconsidering News of the World and Plan l3for
the Middle Class, which were published shortly after he adopted his two sons, Colin
and Nick. "I listened carefully to what people said, and most often that was 'you're
being affirmative.' But I don't want gratuitous affirmation. I want it to be true. Neither
do I want gratuitous angst. There's a ton of that. These new stories are darker and
tougher, and there's an erotic edge that has a different dynamic to it than my earlier
writing.

"Sometimes when a writer is working
there's a kind of spillage. I'd rather spill than try and mop up. I'm not afraid of
emotion, and most, though not all, of my emotions are centered in and around my family.
And I can be a little over-indulgent sometimes. Eder's comments came at a time when my
stories were juxtaposed against the minimalist stories that were everywhere. As a writer
your concerns do change, as does your willingness to confront things, in that you're more
able to bring that to the page.

"My theory of the short story is that
anything goes. In these three books, I've tried to write stories that I would read twice.
No formulas, stay out of other people's footprints. If someone else can write it, let
them. And if you're writing for someone else, stop.

"Each of the stories in The Hotel
Eden is an exploration. I usually start from the smallest place, and it's very
personal. Without really knowing where it might go, I'll try and evoke something,
somewhere Elaine and I went, or a mistake I made. So I start with a hot point, try and
feature it, and open it with respect as I write....

"The lightest stories in the collection
are about people who have lost their loves. The more serious stories are people who are
losing love, and part of themselves.

"I think there's nothing better than a
romantic, character or writer, because of all the fraught counter-point within his or her
breast. There's the knowledge that you're in love, but you're going to be heartbroken.
It's the lost thing -the difference between what I want and what I got. That's one of the
great energies in lots of writers - in Richard Ford's work, and it's one of the quiet
energies at work in Ann Beattie's as well. I may be more overt, and I think I'm a simpler
writer than either of those two writers, in that I name names, and I'm not particularly
smart.

"Any writer spends a lot of time
'fishing,' making forays into this and that. For some people, lightning strikes, but for
the rest of us, you make inroads into the wilderness, and you're not sure what you're
doing. I'd written two novels, and had them published before I felt I could go out into
that wilderness and write a message without a rote format that mattered to me. That
happened with News of the World. It was then that I felt I could stand on my own.
Now, I like that buzz you feel when you're on the trail of something graphic and
realistic, and you know the words are really close to something honest."

The landscape figures prominently in
Carlson's new work. "I believe in place more and more!" he says, dropping the
last solid ball on the table. He turns his attention to the eight ball, calling a comer
pocket shot. "It's one of the great pleasures in reading a story, and second, it's
one of the key instruments in writing a story. As my friend, Shelby Hearon, said this
summer at the Aspen Writer's Conference, 'nothing happens no where.'

"This is part of the absolute
fundamentals. I need place. It's place that gives me everything, because if I can believe
where I am, I can believe that something happens there."

That fish was a keeper, a twenty-one inch Brown, and so were
the two
Toby took around the next bend as we passed under a monstrous spruce that
leaned over the water. Four hills later we drifted into the narrows of Red
Canyon. It was the deep middle of the everlasting summer twilight, and I
cranked us over to the bank, booting the old wooden oars hard on the shallow
rocky bottom. We came ashore halfway down the gorge so we could make
camp. The rocky cliffs had gone coral in the purple sky and the river glowed
green behind us as we unloaded the raft. ("Floating the Green," in The Hotel
Eden)

Carlson is well known for his imaginative
experiments in the form of the story. In "The Chromium Hook" the story radiates
out from the central hub of a Halloween prank as explained by a panoply of characters,
including a radio announcer, institutionalized. housewife, high school football star,
the town sheriff, an estranged husband, and a one-armed psychopath. "The Chromium
Hook" was recently staged at Emerson College.

"Many times, I do write a story from a
notion, as I did in 'The Chromium Hook.' In that story, and in the other stories which
involve a certain retrospective, either by a single character, or stories where different
people have different points of view, the story idea starts there, but I have no real
sense of where it's going to end."

Winning the next break, Carlson runs the
table, sinking four balls in a row. He pauses, passing the cue back and forth between his
hands.

"One of the things I'm proudest of in my
work is that I'm not smarter than any of my stories," Carlson says. "They've
taught me a lot! But you have to be patient, and listen. It's humbling." He resists
having his work categorized, or thought of as operating in a particular literary tradition
or style. "As a writer I stay away from the teacher's side of the desk, come out from
behind it, and go native."

The rebounding of the pool balls across the
table reminds him of the writing life; of influences, the waxing and waning of literary
fashions. "I think writers are doing the correct thing by writing as fiercely as they
can, in the way in which they want to," he says. "What we need in stories is a
true dramatic dynamic, which is evidenced by the complicated human heart. Everybody knows
this. It isn't a secret!

"I'm most interested in finding dramatic
moments that broaden and reveal our emotional inventory. What I'm trying to do with these
stories is have an examination of some of our, for lack of a better phrase, 'moral
conundrums.' You get into a place where some of the options benefit you, where some harm
you, sometimes where both are true, and it isn't clear which is which.

"When I was working on 'Oxygen,' there's
a scene where the main character is asked to get a glass of water for a man who is
bedridden":

Mr. Rensdale lay white and twisted in the bed. He looked the
way
the dying look, his face parched and sunken, the mouth a dry orifice,
his eyes little spots of water….
He rolled his hand in a little flip toward the bed table and his glass
of water....Who knows what happened in me then, because I stood in the little bedroom with
Mr. Rensdale and then I just rolled the dolly and the expired tank out and down the
stairs. I didn't go to him; I didn't hand him the glass of water. I burned; who would ever
know what I had done? ("Oxygen," in The Hotel Eden).

"It's the turning point in the story~
and the kid doesn't do it. He just leaves the room. And that's what I mean about
fighting my nice-guy impulse. Because he could have got him the water, and when he didn't,
I sat at the typewriter for about ten minutes absolutely mortified, but I was thrilled, it
was this sense of nasty shame. And I knew the story had taken the turn I wanted, and now I
had to follow it very closely."

"My favorite quote about this is what
Joy Williams said. She wants her stories to be 'swift and damaging.' The responsibility of
fiction is to ask the question precisely. And that's all we do—not answer the question;
not be pat, zip it closed, or make us all pleased with ourselves.

"I don't think about theme. I'm
interested in a story because it is real, and it will help us believe what the next
sentence might be. That's my credo. You write a sentence, and you hope you keep people
around the fire, that they believe you, until the next sentence.

"We were talking about craft
considerations in stories at a writing conference once, when this guy said he was 'worried
about evil in his novels.' And it just stopped me flat. I said, 'Good, good! you want trouble
with evil.' There's an example of a writer with his cart before his horse, where he knows
what he wants to say, and he's going to prove it somehow. I see a lot of that-does theme
come before story, or story before theme?"

After a second win at the pool table, Carlson
"scratches" after the break. Replacing the cue ball on the table with a rueful
grin, he recalls an analogous experience. "My editor called me up and said, J have
good news and bad news." I said "Tell me the good news." It turned out that my first book was
reviewed in the daily New York Times. And it was good news because the Times
isn't going to blast nobody from nowhere. So she read the review to me, and it was
fabulous, written by an editor from The Nation; everything I wanted. So I
asked, "What's the bad news?" There was a blackout in New York; the paper never bit the
streets. It was 14 June 197 and so my picture and that review appear in a
collector's edition of the Times.

"It's a funny story now. Reviews are an
interesting problem for a writer. Honestly, I'm not really used to them. It's part of the
marketplace, and I try to not think of the marketplace."

A scratch indeed, but it's the kind of
self-deprecatory anecdote Carlson likes to impart when he is a guest instructor at
writers' conferences. As the billiard balls have stopped dropping for him, Carlson turns
philosophical. He explains that he continually seeks out new challenges as a writer, so
that he doesn't find himself writing the same book, or story.

"You know (that you've challenged
yourself) when you get in the margins, writing about when people do and do not tell the
truth; when you're talking about how close people get to each other. Then you're involved
in writing a story that you realize will be revelatory. I feel a sudden moment of doubt, a
hesitation, but I ignore it. I want to get the story, but it's going to be tough.

"Part of the privilege of having written
so many stories is that now I feel 'bring it on.' That's what writing is, a strange
pleasant dance you do, in which you know at any time you can be harmed. I wouldn't write a
story that didn't matter to me, or write a story that I felt anyone else could write. So
there, as soon as you've defined those boundaries, you understand that you're at risk-that
this all matters, and is important."